A tweet about this was the first thing I noticed about travel and IWD: Trainline partners with Code First:Girls to train 20,000 women in coding by 2020. The plan is to deliver a training programme with their staff acting as mentors for women, and Trainline will also provide financial support. Together they will campaign to raise between £0.5M and £1.5M each year for three years.

As the DailyEdge put it, “Aer Lingus offered women priority boarding for International Women’s Day and it caused a LOT of controversy”. Apparently a few were calling for the same to happen on International Men’s Day, and there was some rather unhelpful dialogue on Twitter, but overall this was well received by both men and women.

At Emirates an all-women team made flight EK 225 from Dubai to San Francisco happen. This included a fully female flight crew, and only women working on all the ‘above wing’ and ‘below wing’ activities to enable the flight to depart. This was a team of over 75 women, with over 25 nationalities between them, so there may not have been gender diversity that day, but it was certainly a diverse team.

But it wasn’t just Emirates, on Monday 5th British Airways claimed a record for the most women involved in a single flight – crew, baggage handlers, check-in staff and security. (But Emirates seem to have smashed that on the Thursday, see above.) This was flight BA1484 from London Heathrow to Glasgow. easyJet had six all-female crews operating 16 easyJet flights on #IWD2018 and Virgin Atlantic had three all-female crews on flights out of Manchester, London Gatwick and London Heathrow.